Through the course of his career, Abbasi has been involved with infrastructure software for application development, business intelligence and enterprise portals, as well as application software for e-learning and the pharmaceutical industry. In 1982, he joined Oracle - a 30-person startup at that time. After successfully starting the company's Midwest field operations, he chose to join the development organization as one of only two programmers working on technologies outside of the database because he had learned through conversations with hundreds of customers that what they wanted most was to achieve productivity through business process automation. While he agrees that productivity through automation has been the one value proposition in the IT industry for the last 30 years, Abbasi predicts a sea change relating to IT's future value proposition.
Control Through Integration
"As enterprises outsource more business processes to service providers, our industry will change dramatically as the emphasis on productivity enhancements through automation diminishes," says Abbasi. "As companies choose to focus more on their core business competencies, outsourcing is increasingly an alternative to staffing and automating non-core processes internally." He continues to explain that there are three types of outsourcing. The first is business processing outsourcing (BPO) where organizations can outsource payroll, HR benefits administration, the procurement function or accounts payable processing, for example. The second type of outsourcing is the new breed of software-as-a-service companies that make software available as a subscription service. By hosting applications and remotely collecting all of the data, the cost of ownership is greatly reduced, as is the overhead of administration. In the third type of outsourcing, organizations such as EDS and IBM assume control of a company's IT organization and promise to deliver the same results or better for less.
The impact of these types of outsourcing is the driver for the change that Abbasi predicts. "The primary focus of IT will no longer be to enhance productivity through automation because many of the business functions and processes will be outsourced instead. What is the IT value proposition for a business function or process that has been outsourced? The value proposition must be to gain greater control through integration," explains Abbasi. When something is outsourced, the requirement changes from one of automation to one of control. "For example," says Abbasi, "if you've outsourced HR to Hewitt, do you have control over, and visibility into, the data they collect? Regulatory requirements and effective fact-based management require having access to all of the data - whether it is being collected in house or is being collected by service providers on behalf of the customer," he notes.
Informatica's Value
How does this need for control and visibility impact Informatica? "Outsourcing to service providers leads to even greater data fragmentation - across IT systems that span enterprise boundaries. A company's payroll data might be in a database at ADP, its benefits data in a system at Fidelity, and its sales-incentive compensation data in an in-house CRM application. In order to gain a holistic view of total compensation, for example, cross-enterprise data integration is critical," remarks Abbasi. "Outsourcing is not a passing fad, and it is rapidly disaggregating IT systems and fragmenting data. With increased outsourcing, the need for control and integration is much greater. Enabling the virtual enterprise is a very promising strategic opportunity for Informatica." To ensure that Informatica is ready to meet the diverse data integration needs of the future, Abbasi has enhanced the company's singular focus on enterprise data integration to include cross-enterprise data integration.
Meeting Broad Data Integration Needs
The plan Abbasi implemented to grow Informatica from data warehousing to broader data integration - and to grow from departmental projects to enterprise and even cross-enterprise initiatives - is a noteworthy strategy. Providing the technology necessary for the varied data integration needs of companies is what Informatica is all about. "Data integration needs are only going to grow as organizations take a more holistic view of all the projects that require data integration - not just data warehousing, but data migration, data consolidation, master data management, data synchronization and business activity monitoring," states Abbasi. "We provide greater value to our customers by addressing a much broader range of their data integration needs than any other vendor, and we have no other agenda than to ensure that our customers are successfully integrating data in whatever ways their business demands."
"Our objective is to automate the entire data integration life cycle," explains Abbasi. "The first step is to access all data - data residing in persistent data sources, data that is delivered as messages or exposed as Web services. The second step is to discover all of the relevant data, and meta data plays a very big role in that. The third step is to transform the data, and the last step is to deliver the data. Clearly, organizations need an integrated framework to manage all these steps, and they need the ability to audit the process. Auditability is becoming much more important in order to comply with all of today's regulatory requirements. We deliver technology that automates all of the different steps within the data integration life cycle."
In support of Informatica's broader data integration focus, key developments recently announced include the company's new PowerCenter Advanced Edition, a unified platform that addresses the full data integration lifecycle. Additionally, the company also announced support for unstructured data, making Informatica the first unified platform for processing unstructured, semi-structured and structured data. Recent data integration benchmark tests of Informatica's 64-bit PowerCenter data integration platform running on Solaris 10, a Sun Fire E256K server and Sun StorEdge 3510 arrays delivered throughput of one terabyte faster than any previously published data integration performance result.
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